"Madelung" - Word of the Day from the OED

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Madelung, n.2

DRAFT ENTRY June 2009

Physics.

Brit. /mad()l/, /md()l/, U.S. /mæd()l/  [< the name of Erwin R. Madelung (1881-1972), German physicist, who first described the constants.
  Erwin Madelung was the second son of Otto Madelung (see MADELUNG n.¹).] 

    1. Madelung constant n. a fixed number associated with an ionic crystalline solid, usually defined for materials with a halite-like crystal lattice as the product of potential energy per constituent ion and the inter-ionic distance divided by the square of the electronic charge, and analogously for materials with other crystal structures.

1932 J. SHERMAN in Chem. Rev. 11 106 In the sodium chloride structure, the first for which the Madelung constant was evaluated (by Madelung himself), the positions of the ions are completely determined by the symmetry requirements of the structure. 1978 H. M. ROSENBERG Solid State (ed. 2) i. 14 For the NaCl lattice the Madelung constant is almost exactly 1.75. 1996 Canad. Jrnl. Chem. 74 885 We also study the Madelung constant of simple cubic lattices as a function of spatial dimension.

    2. Madelung potential n. the potential at any point in an ionic lattice due to the combined electric field of all the ions in the lattice.

1966 Physical Rev. 164 753/1 Crystals of the general types M_n and X_m do not have this property of a symmetric Madelung potential influence. 1987 Jrnl. Chem. Physics 86 6959/2 The Mulliken charge approximation for the evaluation of the Madelung potential.

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